As someone who writes travel articles for newspapers and magazines, I’ve learned to navigate the world of PR. Basically, a company gives you something for free, in the hope that you will write about it, giving them exposure. In travel, this means that a brand (or tourist board) sends you somewhere in the hope that you will write about the destination or hotel. Of course, you cannot be forced to write good things about a product or place, but there will usually be some form of agreement, such as a “boiler plate” or “fact box” in which the air fares or hotel prices will be included.

But media is changing. Many people, and particularly millennials, no longer go to magazines or TV to engage with what they are interested in. Instead, they will go directly to a trusted source: a YouTuber, a blogger, an Instagrammer. These people are known as “influencers,” and are replacing traditional media in many fields, including beauty, sports, fitness and travel.

In my field of travel, someone thinking of going to India may look at vlogger Alex Chacon or Instagrammer Kristin Addis instead of Sunday Times Travel Magazine. Brands have recognised that, in order to raise awareness in their target market, they need to be in the places where their target market are hanging out to learn. Just as brand previously ensured they were featured in magazines, they now need influencers to use and talk about their products.

The Agency Guy

Mike Bandar runs Real Tribe, an agency that connects brands with “influencers.” Here’s what he had to say about the phenomenon.

Why – the slow rejection of traditional advertising

Banner ad click through rates went from 44% in 1994 to 0.004% today

Almost no-one clicks on paid search appearances in Google

18-24 year olds don’t click on hyperlinks anymore – they cannot be forced to move elsewhere

Same change happened in print: from classified ads, to ads between content, to advertorials

Brands, like Sony Vaio and Heineken, use product placement in movies, such as James Bond

What – Influencers

Alternative: rather than forcing people to see your product, talk to them in the way that they already do. We like to boast or talk about products or services we enjoy. People listen to opinions they respect. Influencer marketing hijacks these existing relationships.

Different to celebrity

People come to them because they are the leader of a tribe. They are seen as friends and are accessible

They are highly engaged and come with trust

They are the model consumer in a genre

They curate the message between a brand and consumer – commenting, recommending, using

Tips for brands using influencers

Be clear on your goal (makes it easier to measure ROI)

Allow creative freedom – they are partners not actors

They know their audience better than you do

You aren’t buying a banner ad. You are buying their influence over their audience

Pick them carefully

You want those that are most active online, not using that as a platform for standard fame

The Influencer

Brenna Holeman is freelance travel writer who has run the travel blog www.thisbatteredsuitcase.com for seven years. She gets about 50-60,000 page views on her blog each month, and has a social media reach of about 30,000. She told us how it works for an influencer.

How do they earn?

Affiliate links on a blogger’s website to external services, or products that they recommend. Earns blogger a small commission if it results in a sale

Sponsored posts. The blog equivalent of advertorials. Content is directed by the client. Dying off because Google penalises

Paid press trips – rather than just having a trip paid for (classic travel PR), they are actually paid to go on it and write posts about it. But the client does not direct the content; the blogger retains editorial control. Not really too different to traditional journalism. A brand needs a good relationship with a blogger to do this well

E-books and commerce

Brand ambassadorship. They don’t just write one post – it’s ongoing. See Alex in Wonderland and PADI. We trust PADI because we trust Alex.

How they help

A blogger will give a brand exposure to their perfect target audience (if selected carefully), but with much higher engagement. You gain exposure to that audience through endorsement from a trusted individual.

Do they have real, organic followers, with genuine interaction and engagement on social media and posts?

Only 1 in 6 social media posts should be ambassadorial/sponsored/PR. The rest have to be totally authentic

Pitching them by email

Use their name never “hey blogger” or “hey thisbatteredsuitcase” – they receive 10-20 emails a day, so make yours stand out

Reference something on their blog or social media that’s relevant

Introduce yourself and company – explaining what you DO

Explain exactly what you want from working with them. Be clear. Reduce the number of back and forth emails

Seek an ongoing relationship so it’s not just transactional

Give them complete creative control

Work with mid-sized bloggers

Ask for their rates

Don’t sent automated or vague “work with us requests”

If you have no budget, don’t expect anything in return – even a review or write-up

NEVER offer exposure as a motivation

Give them stuff for free – even if it’s a party with free beer – to build a relationship

Consider contracts for every collaboration

And finally – influencers, like all people, like to talk about what they do. So the best way to access their audience is to write an interview with them on your site – they’re quite likely to share that.

We don’t often put a lot of thought into speaking, but the growth of audio content has made us more aware of our voices. A poor presenting voice can be distracting, whilst a good presenter brings content to life and lifts it off the page.

As someone who does public speaking, and is planning an entry into podcasting, vocal skills are becoming more and more important to me. So it was with great pleasure that I caught the excellent BBC Academy Podcast with voice and presentation coach Elspeth Morrison.

The podcast focuses on recording intros or links to a clip, which entails reading from a pre-prepared script. So how can you sound more natural? Through a mixture of planning and delivery:

Planning

Write like you talk. It’s easy to write over-academically, with long words. When you then read it out, it sounds formal and stilted. So make your script sound natural.

Marking up. Read through the script and mark where you want to convey particular feelings or inflections. But do more than just underline – put in smiley faces, or draw on inflections.

Find your idiom; a way of speaking that feels natural to you. There’s no “right way” to talk. Work to your strengths and be a broadcast version of yourself, rather than trying to be someone else.

Go off-script in conversations by actively listening and following up with questions.

Use “Surfing Words” such as “but” or “so” to help things flow, and get you from A to B.

Delivery

Vary your tone and rhythm. You might have a lovely voice, and create a beautiful cadence, but if you repeat that in every sentence it becomes monotonous.

Breathe. When speaking, we breathe through our mouth, so take a large, silent breath before you start to relax yourself and fill your lungs.

Relax. Especially your shoulders and jaw. Tense shoulders make you sound high-pitched. And a tense jaw makes you sound nasal.

Slow down. Take your time and sell what you’re saying – don’t rush to get through it.

Smile. It brightens the tone and adds treble to your voice.

Read two or three words ahead of what you’re saying, so you’re not surprised by a word.

Remember, there’s no “perfect” way to present. It’s a matter of personal tweaks from where you are starting from.

Ernest Hemingway is best known as a novelist, but he started his career in journalism. For some time he was based in Paris, travelling Europe and writing for the Canadian newspaper TheToronto Star. It was here that he developed the concise, economical writing style that would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memoir of those early days in Paris, as he made the transition from journalist to novelist. It features his friendships with Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound; his visits to Sylvia Bleach’s original Shakespeare & Company bookshop; gambling, cafes and ski trips.

The book inspired Woody Allen’s film Midnight In Paris and gave me some ideas for my article about the city’s creative heritage.

The book also contains thoughts about writing and creativity. I’ve always admired Hemingway’s direct and deceptively simple style. I’ve tried to emulate it, and it’s always made what I’ve written more powerful, so this book was educational as well as interesting.

The aim of this post is to draw out Hemingway’s direct advice and thoughts on being a writer. I hope it helps – please write your own thoughts in the comments section, or Tweet me @AshBhardwaj.

How To Start

A Cold Morning In Paris

The book starts with a walk to a café, where Hemingway will write for the day. He evokes Paris with a few sentences about the cold weather, poor streets and the taste of oysters washed down with white wine. He talk of his routine:

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day…”

And he muses on doubts and discipline:

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time and it was good and severe discipline.”

I learned a lot from this paragraph. It explains his method – and his belief in the importance of discipline – which contrasts with some characters in the book. He talks about getting himself in the right mindset:

“I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; listening I hoped” and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself important to do it.”

Later, when he couldn’t afford to eat, he says that paintings by Cézanne “were sharper and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” He is talking about actual physical hunger, but he reflects on hunger driving him and how “Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.”

He also says that he “was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.”

The Bay of Marseilles by Cézanne

There are wonderful examples of his storytelling too. In Chapter Four he casts a dark premonition that’s almost painful. He describes a happy scene with his wife, which ends with, “’We’re always lucky,’ I said. And like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.”

That final sentence, which seems so simple, adds layers of frustration, complacency and futility. For the rest of the book, each happy, loving scene with his wife tastes bittersweet to the reader.

Lessons:

Treat work as a profession. Discipline yourself to write daily, and just to sit down and write one sentence. No matter how bad it is, it will get you started.

If you don’t know what to write about, just write something true; write about something you’ve done.

Hemingway recounts his comings and goings from Paris. He talks about the time his wife lost his papers, meals in cafes, chicken in Lyon. And it’s all done using half the word-count of any other writer, yet more evocative because of that.

He talks of “my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

But he includes details that I would not think of. Of the garden near Montparnasse he says, “the horse chestnut trees were in blossom and there were many children playing on the gravelled walks with their nurses sitting on the benches, and I saw wood pigeons in the trees and heard others that I could not see.”

This type of sentence, which almost feels too long, is typical of Hemingway, adding one more thing than you would think of including: “with their nurses sitting on the benches”…. “and heard others that I could not see.”

He doesn’t describe what the nurses are wearing, or how the wood pigeons sounds, but it’s enough to take you there.

Lessons:

Write what you see and hear, nothing more. Don’t over-describe.

Paint the scene in a minimalist fashion.

Conversations

Hemingway’s conversations bounce back and forth like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot (written by Beckett, who was also in Paris for much of his adult life) – the best of which is a conversation about social hierarchy with Ford Madox Ford. His conversations with his wife sound like scripts from old Hollywood movies, but they stand out as romantic and honest.

Hemingway the Apprentice

Sylvia Beach, with an older Hemingway

Hemingway makes the most of Sylvia Beach’s library, discovering new writers and learning from them. He says that “to have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.”

He says Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi could be “so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness… the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers.”

He is confused by Dostoyevsky because his style is the opposite of the lean style Hemingway uses – “he almost never used the ‘mot juste’ – the one and only correct word to use – and yet made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did…. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply.”

He talks this through with Ezra Pound, the man Hemingway “liked and trusted most as a critic, then the man who believed in the ‘mot juste’ – the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.”

This is why Hemingway’s writing is so economical, and why it often took him “a whole morning just to write a single paragraph.”

Lessons:

Study writing through reading – think about what different writers do, and their styles.

Find friends and mentors who are practising writers and talk to them about what you’ve read.

Find your style, but recognise that it’s not the ONLY style.

Try to find the ‘mot juste’ – the one true word for something.

Authenticity or refinement

Whilst on a road-trip, Fitzgerald tells Hemingway the story of his wife, Zelda, having an affair. Hemingway reflects on how refining a story dilutes its authenticity.

“Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were told better each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing, drinking and discipline

The amount of drinking matches Hemingway’s legend, but it still seems a lot. He regularly drinks one or two bottles of wine over lunch or whilst reading a book in the park, although his “training was never to drink after dinner, nor before I wrote, nor while I was writing.”

It is through Hemingway’s friendship with Fitzgerald that he sees the problems of alcohol, for “anything that [Fitzgerald] drank seemed to stimulated him too much and then poison him.”

Hemingway appreciates the educational aspects of this friendship, such as when Fitzgerald “gave me a sort of oral Ph.D. thesis I Michael Arlen.”

We also learn about destructive forces around creativity, such as Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda who “was jealous of Scott’s work…. She smiled happily… as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.”

Lessons:

Drink. But not too much.

Be weary of saboteurs who will distract you from your vocation.

Some of my favourite quotes

“Everything good or bad left an emptiness when it stopped.” – Hemingway

“Anything you have to bet on to get a kick isn’t worth seeing.” – Mike Ward

“We need more mystery in our lives.” – Evan Shipman

“I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.” – Hemingway

Summary

This is what I took from A Moveable Feast on a single reading. Far more in-depth analyses have been done elsewhere, and I have steered clear of the controversies that surround it, the aspersions he casts on others, and the less savoury parts of Hemingway’s character. Hemingway was no perfect role model, but his legacy on writing is immense.

To discover more of his writing style, start with the Old Man And The Sea. It’s the short novel (you can read it in a train journey) that helpd him win the Nobel Prize For Literature.

Back when I attended every networking event I could find, I saw a talk by Ajaz Ahmed, one of the founders of media agency AKQA. AKQA is one of the most respected and successful agencies of the last decade, producing work for Nike that revolutionised how they engage with their fans, and integrating apps, digital and marketing in ground-breaking ways.

Fascinated by how they had driven innovation, I interviewed James Hilton, who was then the Chief Creative Officer of AKQA, and wrote this feature for Etihad Inflight magazine.

It’s still one of my favourite interviews, and I learned plenty about Creative Leadership, Inspiration, and innovative thought. Check it out.

In 2013 I visited Paris to do some research about the city’s heritage, and the personalities that lived there. I discovered some remarkable stories about Paris’s creative past, and how it echoes in the city today. Check out the article below. It features photos by my mate Levison Wood – before photographers were taking pictures of him!

Today, anyone can broadcast through platforms like YouTube. With amateurs producing incredible content, and organisations like Vice creating films specifically for online broadcast, where do traditional broadcasters like the BBC fit in?

“When done badly, digital for TV amounts to a Twitter hashtag and crap microsite,” says Alex Ayling, Head of BBC Worldwide Digital Studios, and the man responsible for online elements of the BBC’s most recognisable shows, including Top Gear, Dr Who and Sherlock.

“But it doesn’t need to be like that. With a little planning and awareness, digital can add a huge amount of value to traditional television.”

As an alumnus of Ones To Watch (the Edinburgh TV Festival talent scheme) I was lucky enough to hear Alex speak at an alumni event in London. Here’s a summary of his key points, but follow him on Twitter @alexjayling to get tips directly from the man himself.

Stop Broadcasting, Start Conversing

In the old broadcast model, the viewer has no involvement until transmission, but with digital, they can be involved at every stage.

For Dr Who, Alex and his team created a YouTube channel (Dr Who: The Fan Show) to complement the TV series. A few innovations made it more relevant to online:

Hired a fan as a researcher for Development (she became the presenter).

Asked fans to send in ideas for Pre-Production.

Found (and paid) fan experts to Produce content (such as a Minecraft version of an episode).

Asked for comment, interaction and feedback during online Transmission.

Curated and shared fan content, such as YouTube channels that feature reviews of the show, encouraging conversation.

Dr Who: The Fan Show

Storytelling hasn’t changed; Methods of consumption have

Online, the storytelling structure is shifted:

TV magazine pieces need an intro, middle and ending.

Online viewers search for a specific topic and select a video based on its Title and Thumbnail.

That’s the intro done, so jump right into the meat of the story; the video itself is the “middle” requiring no intro.

The “ending” is the online conversation afterwards, rather than a summary in the video.

Hire (or be) the right people

If digital deliverables are planned from the start, they are quick, cheap and easy to produce. Check out “Move” by STA Travel. All it required was one minute of identical filming each day. But to make that happen, the producers had to know what they wanted and plan locations. Just like regular TV.

Self-contained opportunistic content can work really well. During filming of “The Hunt,” a polar bear ate all the crew’s food, but left the Marmite. It made for humorous content that wouldn’t work in the main show, but which connected with viewers and generated lots of PR. Making the most of these opportunities requires someone who is thinking beyond the main show.

Find people who love what you do, and they’ll do your marketing for you. Get them involved at an early stage, so they have a sense of ownership and excitement. Dr Who The Fan Show is a brilliant example of this: enthusiasm and authenticity is essential, but technical skills can be taught.

You don’t need to be an expert at everything to make ephemeral content, just good enough to make it happen: be a “digital Swiss Army Knife” – producer, editor, presenter and researcher.

Be Curious

Use different platforms to reach different audiences, or to have different effects.

Google Plus is great for special interest and technical fields

LinkedIn generates massive shares and referrals in finance and professional services

Snapchat is good for behind-the-scenes updates

Instagram works better for heavily-posed PR-style updates

Periscope is good for press and marketing

Twitch works well for Livestreaming

Whatsapp data is impossible to track, but results in lots of traffic through referral

Facebook pages need to be long-life. For documentary series, make it part of a broader “fan page” – such as the BBC Nature series.

Summary

Stop broadcasting. Start Conversing

Storytelling hasn’t changed; Methods of consumption have

Hire (or be) the right people

Be curious

If you haven’t already, apply for a place on Ones To Watch or The Network; they’re completely free and give you an all-expenses pass to the Edinburgh Television Festival, and access to monthly alumni events, such as the one at which Alex shared his advice. It’s the best thing I’ve done to develop my career in TV.

In the summer of 2015 I visited Ladakh for the first time. It’s like nowhere else in India, as the barrier of the Himalayan range means it is both dry (because it’s in the rain shadow) and culturally distinct.

The area is much more akin to Tibet in environment, people and culture. Whilst I was there, a Tibetan lama came to the area to give a blessing and sermon. It was a day out and festival for the people of Ladakh.